Chart Watch, December: Mobile Game Download Rankings Hold

Mobile game download rankings: the top ten barely moved

December closed the way most of the fourth quarter did. The mobile game download rankings held their shape rather than reshuffling, and puzzle kept its grip on the top of the download charts, the category's low-friction install funnel doing what it usually does over a holiday period when casual, low-commitment titles pick up incremental volume from new devices and gift-card spend. Survival and kingdom-builder 4X titles continued to punch well above their download rank on ad intelligence trackers; Whiteout Survival did it, Last War: Survival did it, and the gap has defined the category through most of 2024.

Revenue: the incumbents keep compounding

On the revenue side the story is continuity, not movement. Monopoly GO! enters its third year live still positioned among the largest single spenders on mobile UA, and its persistence at the top says more about the compounding value of an established live-ops and social-invite loop than about anything new launching into the category. Royal Match and Block Blast! continue to anchor the puzzle-adjacent top-grossing charts. Both benefit from the same low-CPI, high-retention profile that keeps puzzle economics attractive even while CPMs elsewhere in the market stay elevated.

One genre note

The gap between download rank and ad-spend rank in the 4X and survival category is now wide enough that it should change how a buyer reads any chart in isolation. A title outside the download top twenty can still be one of the heaviest bidders in the auction, because its payback horizon rests on whale monetisation rather than broad download volume. Read download charts without a spend tracker open alongside them and you'll systematically understate which titles are actually setting CPMs in a given category.

What it means for buyers

Going into the first buying weeks of January, treat the puzzle category's download strength as a signal of low-cost top-of-funnel volume, and treat 4X ad spend concentration as a signal of where CPMs will stay sticky regardless of that title's download rank. Budgets chasing cheap installs and budgets competing for whale-quality users belong on different charts. Plan them that way.

Related archive reading

• Chart Watch, February: Mobile Game Revenue Rankings Hold
• Chart Watch, September: Mobile Game Download Charts